Description

Aliens of Gold, the first game in the Blake Stone series, pits the space-age British secret agent against Dr. Pyrus Goldfire; a madman bent on world domination. Using a mastery of genetic engineering and a tremendous reserve of wealth, Dr. Goldfire intends to unleash a mutant army upon the Earth.

The first chapter begins in Goldfire's S.T.A.R. Institute headquarters building. Each level has Blake fighting through guards to find an elevator keycard for the next level. Dr. Goldfire will personally appear along the way to fire shots at Blake, and his genetic creations also pose a tough challenge. Each chapter lasts 10 levels, and brings Blake closer to reaching Goldfire, only to have the mad doctor escape to a new installation in his network, and the start of a new chapter.

Blake Stone uses the Wolfenstein 3-D engine to render its levels. Basic gameplay and enemy AI is similar in most respects. Some of Blake's innovations include silent weapons that can kill guards without alerting others. Alerts are given to the player through text messages on the HUD. Health can be gained through use of wall-mounted vending machines, operated with tokens picked up off dead guards. An automap and stat-tracking are both available during gameplay. Finally, there are friendly AI characters who offer clues and powerups when you speak to them - provided Blake doesn't accidentally shoot them first!

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Trivia

Comic

The original documentation for the game included an 11 page comic book which introduced Blake and his arch-enemy, Doctor Goldstern.

Dr. Goldstern's name

The main antagonist of the game was originally named Dr. Goldstern, however, this had to be changed to Goldfire after Apogee received a complaint from a watchful customer, as Mike Maynardrecounts:

Dr. Pyrus Goldfire was originally called Dr. Goldstern. One person sent an email to Apogee complaining about how the name "Goldstern" portrayed Jewish people as evil. So we had to change the name.

Were the name kept as it was, it would have served as a bilingual bonus of sorts, as Stern means 'star' in German, and Goldfire's research centre where the first episode of the game takes place is called The S.T.A.R. Institute.

This change had not prevented the developers from playing with words though: the new -fire part of the name is echoed by Goldfire's first name, Pyrus, which is obviously derived from Greek pyros, meaning 'fire'.

Screen shots from the beta of the game that show the original name of Dr. Goldfire can be found here.

Engine

While Blake Stone uses an updated version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, it is not the significantly upgraded engine that appeared in Shadowcaster.

German index

On January 1, 1995, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS for being extreme violent. The game group offers more information about this topic.

Release

The programmers that developed Blake Stone (JAM Productions) were friends of id Software from when both teams worked at Softdisk Publishing as employees. JAM Productions was aware DOOM was going to be released and that it would kill all sales of Blake Stone, so the game was released early, 1 month before DOOM to hopefully see some sales. The first 30 days of sales brought in a good $100,000 for the development team. Once DOOM was released all income dropped to below $10,000 a month. The company struggled to release Blake Stone: Planet Strike then later the company broke up.